In his syndicated column yesterday, Pat Buchanan defended President Trump’s decision to fire former FBI Director James Comey. While the White House initially said that Comey was fired as a result of the way he publicly handled the inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s emails, Trump subsequently said he fired Comey because he was upset about the investigation into ties between Trump’s circle and the Russian government.
While once again positively comparing Trump to Richard Nixon, Buchanan stated that the same media “hysteria” over Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre is now hounding Trump.
“Yet that was not a constitutional crisis then, and the mandated early retirement of Jim Comey is not a constitutional crisis now,” he said. “And that the mainstream media are equating ‘Russia-gate’ and Watergate tells you what is afoot. Trump is hated by this city, which gave him 4 percent of its votes, as much as Nixon was. And the deep-state determination to bring him down is as great as it was with Nixon.”
Buchanan said that the people questioning the Trump-Russia relationship are practicing “McCarthyism” and wondered if “the endless airing of unproven allegations” is “inherently un-American.”
In the early 1950s, they had a term for this. It was called McCarthyism, and its greatest practitioners invariably turned out to be those who had invented the term.
“Justice delayed is justice denied!” applies to presidents, too.
Trump has been under a cloud of a “Russian connection” to him and his campaign for nearly a year. Yet no hard evidence of Trump-Russia collusion in the election has been produced.
Is not the endless airing of unproven allegations inherently un-American?
In 1973, NBC’s John Chancellor suggested the ouster of Richardson, Ruckelshaus and Cox was the “most serious constitutional crisis” in U.S. history, passing over the secession of 11 Southern states and a Civil War that cost 620,000 lives. One London reporter said that “the whiff of the Gestapo was in the clear October air.”
We see a similar hysteria rising today.
Yet that was not a constitutional crisis then, and the mandated early retirement of Jim Comey is not a constitutional crisis now.
And that the mainstream media are equating “Russia-gate” and Watergate tells you what is afoot.
Trump is hated by this city, which gave him 4 percent of its votes, as much as Nixon was. And the deep-state determination to bring him down is as great as it was with Nixon.
By 1968, the liberal establishment had lost the mandate it had held since 1933, but not lost its ability to wound and kill presidents.
Though Nixon won 49 states, that establishment took him down. Though Ronald Reagan won 49 states, that establishment almost took him down in the Iran-Contra affair.
And that is the end they have in mind for President Trump.
